Burma's 'Great Terror' Moves a Step Closer as Taliban Urges Rohingya to 'Take Up the Sword'

The oppressed minority has been told only violent jihad will make a difference
THE INDEPENDENT: Burma’s worst nightmare came a step closer to reality when a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban’s most hardline faction called on the oppressed Rohingya to “take up the sword and kill in the path of God”.

Other attempts to improve the desperate position of Burma’s Muslim minority were futile, he said last week. “Protest demonstrations, marches [and] condemnation resolutions” were useless. Only violent jihad would make the difference.

This is the great terror of which Burma’s populist Buddhist preachers have for years been warning their congregations, with dire predictions. The hostile climate they have whipped up has led the government to treat the largely stateless Muslim minority in Arakan state ever more inhumanely; and as a result, those predictions could prove self-fulfilling. » | Peter Popham | Sunday, June 14, 2015

Florida Imams Arrested for Aiding Pakistani Taleban
ARAB NEWS: MIAMI: The imam of a Florida mosque and his two sons, one also a Muslim spiritual leader, were arrested on Saturday on charges of financing and supporting the Pakistani Taleban, US officials said.

The three Pakistan-born US citizens were among six charged in a US indictment that accused them of “supporting acts of murder, kidnapping and maiming in Pakistan and elsewhere” carried out by the Pakistani Taleban, which Washington calls a terrorist organization.

The indictment, announced by US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Wifredo Ferrer and the FBI, charged the six with creating a network that transferred funds from the United States to Pakistani Taleban supporters and fighters in Pakistan, including for the purpose of buying arms.

If convicted, each faces up to 15 years in prison for each count of the indictment.

The charges were revealed as US relations with Pakistan are strained over the US raid that killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

Pakistan’s parliament on Saturday condemned the raid that killed Bin Laden and called for a review of relations with the United States. » | Kevin Grey | REUTERS | Sunday, May 15, 2011

White House: Pakistan Taliban Behind Bomb Attempt

Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says
THE NEW YORK TIMES: More firmly and publicly than before, senior officials of the Obama administration on Sunday blamed the failed attempt to blow up a bomb in Times Square on the Pakistani Taliban, an accusation that should increase pressure on the Pakistan military to attack the organization in its bastions in the lawless tribal region of North Waziristan.

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news program “This Week.”

Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the Taliban in Pakistan “directed this plot” and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was “intimately involved” in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just yards from the heart of Times Square.

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, echoed Mr. Holder’s statements Sunday morning, saying that it appeared that Mr. Shahzad, a resident of Bridgeport, Conn., who spent five months in Pakistan until February, was working for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The TTP is believed by some military intelligence officials to have joined forces with Al Qaeda and may be hiding some of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden, who was the motivating force behind the 9/11 attack.

Until now, American officials have speculated that the Pakistan Taliban may have trained Mr. Shahzad during his visit to Pakistan, but Sunday’s statements were their most definitive about the Taliban’s role.

The conclusion that the Pakistani Taliban is behind the attempted bombing “underscores the serious threat that we face from a very determined enemy,” Mr. Brennan said on CNN’s ”State of the Union.” >>> Joseph Berger | Sunday, May 09, 2010

THE SUNDAY TIMES: US warns Pakistan over Times Square bomb attempt: The United States has delivered a tough new warning to Pakistan to crack down on Islamic militants or face severe consequences after the failed Times Square bombing. >>> Anne Barrowclough | Sunday, May 09, 2010

Leading Article: Pakistan Finally Takes on the Monster It Created
THE INDEPENDENT: This is a battle that Islamabad should have embarked upon long ago

This week it became brutally clear that Pakistan is effectively at war. A series of brazen assaults by jihadis on police stations, army garrisons and civilian targets across the country in recent days have claimed 160 lives. The military, meanwhile, is preparing for an assault on the militant stronghold of Waziristan.

The death toll is destined to rise further. There will be more casualties, more bombings and more turmoil in this nuclear-armed nation. This battle against a diffused guerrilla force is likely to take years, rather than months. But we need to be absolutely clear about one thing: this is not a struggle that the Pakistani state can avoid. Indeed, it is one that it should have embarked upon a long time ago.

For the best part of two decades, successive Pakistani governments tolerated the growth of Islamist militias (both in the western tribal regions and in the Punjab) in the belief that these groups were useful proxies in the regional strategic struggle with India. The country's intelligence services even funded and armed them. Just as dangerously, the authorities allowed the religious fundamentalists to establish hundreds of schools which churned out indoctrinated recruits to swell the ranks of the militias. The leaders of the Afghan Taliban were trained in such establishments.

The Pakistani authorities believed they could control these fanatics. They were wrong. Earlier this year when the Pakistani Taliban moved into an area only 100km from the capital Islamabad and began to impose their own brutal penal code on its inhabitants, the penny finally dropped among Pakistan's leaders that they had created a monster. >>> | Saturday, October 17, 2009

New Dark Age Alert! Taliban Gunmen Shooting Couple Dead for Adultery Caught on Camera
Are these the tribal savages Obama wants to do business with?

By now, it should be becoming increasingly obvious to all that Islam is a ‘religion’ neither of peace nor love. Do not let your cowardly politicians fool you!

Further, be sure of this: Wherever Islam spreads, and whenever it becomes stronger in numbers, its adherents become ever more emboldened. If you think that this sort of brutality and savagery couldn’t happen in the West, you are GREATLY mistaken. – ©Mark

THE TELEGRAPH: Taliban gunmen have been filmed executing a surprised couple whom they repeatedly shot for the alleged crime of adultery.


Their deaths were squalid, riddled with bullets in a field near their home by Taliban gunmen as the execution was captured on a mobile telephone.

In footage which is being watched with horror by Pakistanis, the couple try to flee when they realise what is about to happen. But a gunman casually shoots the man and then the woman in the back with a burst of gunfire, leaving them bleeding in the dirt.

Moments later, when others in the execution party shout out that they are still alive, he returns to coldly finish them with a few more rounds.

Their "crime" was an alleged affair in their remote mountain village controlled by militants in an area that was only recently under the government's sway. It was the kind of barbarity that has become increasingly familiar across Pakistan as the Taliban tide has spread.

But this time, with black-turbaned gunmen almost at the gates of Islamabad, the rare footage has shown urban Pakistanis what could now await them.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned that Islamic extremists could take over the nation. >>> By Saeed Shah in Islamabad | Saturday, April 25, 2009

Pakistani Taliban Chief Claims U.S. Shooting
REUTERS: PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Pakistani Taliban militant leader Baituallah [sic] Mehsud claimed on Saturday responsibility for an attack on a U.S. immigration center in New York state in which 13 people were killed.

"I accept responsibility. They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks," Mehsud told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location. >>> Reporting by Alamgir Bitani; Writing by Kamran Haider; Editing by Robert Birsel | Saturday, April 4, 2009

REUTERS: New York Immigrant Center Shooting Leaves 14 Dead

BINGHAMTON, New York - A man armed with two handguns killed 13 people at an immigration services center before apparently turning the gun on himself, authorities in Binghamton, New York, said on Friday.

Police Chief Joseph Zikuski told a news conference the gunman blocked the back entrance of the building with a car, walked in the front door and shot two receptionists, one of whom died, before entering a classroom and killing 12 more people and then apparently committing suicide.

He said that four other people were critically wounded in the latest U.S. shooting incident with multiple casualties.

One of the receptionists survived, pretending to be dead before crawling under a desk where she managed to call police, Zikuski said. She was in critical condition in a hospital. >>> By Hans Pennink | Saturday, April 4, 2009